The Confessions of Artemas Quibble Part 11

Gottlieb suffered this course of conduct to become a habit and then informed me that he proposed to collect the full amount of Mademoiselle Carrell's judgment upon the following Monday. I expressed some incredulity at the idea, but later events proved that my partner was well justified in his prophecy. We had long before procured a warrant for Brown's arrest and the only difficulty lay in executing it upon a week-day. Sunday came and as usual Brother Brown, with his customary bravado, made his appearance in the city. That evening Gottlieb invited me to dine with him at the resort ordinarily frequented by our quarry. True to his invariable custom, Brown turned up there with a party of his cronies and spent the evening in merry feasting, presumably upon the money of our client. It was a clear, moonlight night and when the glowworm showed the matin to be near--or, more correctly, when it neared twelve o'clock-- Brown beckoned to the waiter, paid his bill out of a fat roll of greenbacks, winked good-naturedly at us, and bade his friends good- night. A moment or two later Gottlieb whispered to me to follow him and we stepped forth upon the street. Brown was strolling quietly down Broadway toward Twenty-third Street. A short distance behind followed a thick-set man with a square-cut jaw whom I had frequently noticed in Gottlieb's office.

On the corner of the cross-town thoroughfare Brown paused, looked first at the moon and then at his watch, and proceeded on his const.i.tutional toward the ferry. The street, save for a distant and presumably somnolent policeman, was deserted. The thick-set man crossed to the other side of the way, quickened his steps, overtook and pa.s.sed Brown, recrossed and sauntered toward him. A moment later there was a collision between them, voices were raised in angry altercation and presently Brown was rolling undignifiedly on the pavement, his calls for the police rending the stillness of the night. The officer hastily approached, whistling wildly for aid. Gottlieb and I took refuge in an adjacent doorway. Abruptly, however, Brown's outcries ceased. It is probably that a sudden vision of the consequences of an appeal to police protection came to him as he lay like an overturned June-bug upon the sidewalk.

But the law had been invoked. The car of Juggernaut had started upon its course.

"What's the trouble here?" cried the policeman, as he arrived panting upon the scene.

"This fellow here a.s.saulted me!" instantly answered the man with the bulldog jaw.

"It's a lie!" bellowed Brown, climbing to his feet.

"Well, what have you got to say?" inquired the officer.

Brown hesitated. If he made a counter charge he realized that he would have to go to the police station to make the complaint. This would keep him in the city until after midnight.

"Well?" continued the policeman.

Still Brown paused, rapidly taking account of stock. If he did not deny the charge in terms he would be locked up, which was just as bad. But the bull-jawed chap spoke first.

"I want this man arrested!" he insisted. "He deliberately attacked me!"

"I did no such thing!" shouted Brown. "He came at me without provocation and knocked me down."

"It took you long enough to say so," commented the officer. "I'll have to take you along to the house. Come on, both of you."

Grasping Brown by the arm, he marched him down the street. Suddenly the unfortunate manager began to pour forth a long explanation, quite incoherent so far as the policeman was concerned. He was the victim of a frame-up--it was a job to get him arrested. The officer remarked unsympathetically that he had heard that sort of thing many times before. Gottlieb and I skulked in the rear. When the police station was at last reached the thick-set man made a charge of a.s.sault against the manager and Brown was compelled perforce to make a similar charge against his adversary. Then both were locked up to await a hearing the next morning in the magistrate's court, when, after a prolonged examination, Brown was discharged with an admonition against a too free indulgence in alcoholic liquors.

"Don't be hard on him, judge," said the bull-jawed man. "I had no trouble in defending myself. I think he has had lesson enough."

Much the worse for wear, Mr. Brown pa.s.sed out of the court-room, only to be confronted on the sidewalk by a marshal with a warrant for his arrest. It was Monday morning. His period of immunity was over. His eye caught Gottlieb and myself standing on the corner.

"Well, boys," he exclaimed ruefully, "I'm caught. How much is it going to cost?"

"Fifteen thousand dollars," answered Gottlieb, adding, after a moment's pause--"and disburs.e.m.e.nts."

I need hardly add that Mr. Brown lost no time in raising the necessary ransom and within the hour had paid his judgment in full and secured his discharge. The days are long since over, however, when judgment defaulters had anything to fear; and now a beneficent bankruptcy law, merely for the asking, washes all their debts away.

But the power to secure another's arrest is even more easily available now than in the days of my early practice owing to the great number of new crimes created by the statutes.

One of the most ingenious devices for extorting money that ever came to my attention was invented by a client of mine named Levine --a poor sort of character, to be sure, but cleverer than many a better man. In detail his method was as follows: He first bought at wholesale a large quant.i.ty of cheap watches covered with gold plate. To the inexperienced they looked as if they might possibly be worth forty or fifty dollars apiece. They cost Levine about two dollars and twenty-five cents each. His next step was to select some small shop belonging to a plumber, grocer, or electrician which was ordinarily left in the charge of a clerk while the owner was out attending to his work or securing orders. Levine would find some excuse for entering the shop, engage the clerk in conversation, and having secured his attention would produce one of his watches and extol its merits at length, explaining what a great bargain it was and how--only owing to an exceptional concatenation of circ.u.mstances--he was able to offer it for the ridiculously low figure of thirty dollars.

Now it never made any difference to Levine whether the clerk wanted the watch or not. His procedure remained the same in all cases.

He would first offer to let the fellow have it by paying one dollar a week on the installment plan. If this did not appeal to the clerk Levine would persuade him to keep it for a short time on approval, paying down a dollar "as security." Almost all of his victims would agree to this if only to be rid of him. In default of aught else he would lay the watch on the counter and run away.

Nothing more would occur for a couple of weeks, during which the clerk would hold the watch pending its owner's return, little suspecting what was going on meantime. Levine, having "landed"

his watch, immediately swore to a verified complaint in an action at law for "goods sold and delivered," setting forth on the date in question he had sold--not to the clerk, but to his _employer_-- a gold watch for the sum of fifty dollars, which the latter had then and there promised to pay for at once. The complaint further recited that the money had been duly demanded and payment refused, and asked judgment for fifty dollars and the costs and disburs.e.m.e.nts of the action. Levine would then procure from some irresponsible person an affidavit that the latter had personally served a copy of the complaint in question, together with a summons, upon the defendant, and place the case on the calendar for trial. Of course no papers were in fact served upon anybody and Levine would in due course secure judgment by default for sixty-odd dollars. Armed with a certified copy of the judgment and a writ of attachment, and accompanied by a burly deputy marshal selected for the ferocity of his appearance, Levine would wait until some opportune time when the owner of the shop was again absent and the shop had been left in charge of the same clerk or a member of the family. Bursting roughly in, he would demand whether or not it was the intention of the owner to pay the judgment, while at the same moment the deputy would levy on the stock in trade.

The owner of the shop, having been hastily summoned, would return to demand angrily what the rumpus was all about. By this time the clerk would have recovered his wits sufficiently to denounce the proceeding as an outrage and the suit as baseless. But his master, who saw judgment against himself for sixty dollars and his goods actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to, much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they availed naught, when Levine, with an expression of horror at such deliberate mendacity on the part of the clerk, was wont to say:

"Ask him, pray, whether he has not got the watch in his pocket at this very moment!"

Usually this was indeed the fact, as the clerk had no idea what else to do with it until Levine should return.

"So-ho!" his master would shout wrathfully. "What do you mean by saying that you did not agree to buy the watch? Why, you have kept it all the time! What's more, you've pretended to buy it in my name! And now my shop is turned into a bear garden and there is a judgment against me and my goods are attached! A fine result of your extravagance!"

"But I never agreed to buy it!" insists the clerk. "This man left it here on approval!"

"Pis.h.!.+" answers the employer. "That is all very well; but what have you to say to the judgment of the court? Now, my fine fellow, you will either pay up this money that you owe or I'll advance it myself and take it out of your wages."

In every case, despite the protests of the clerk, the money would be handed over and the shop released from levy. Unfortunately, after working the game for several years, Levine came a cropper by carelessly trying it on one of the same clerks that he had victimized some time before. The clerk, being of an unusually vindictive disposition, followed the matter up. Having first arrested the man who made the false affidavit of service, he induced him to turn State's evidence against my client and landed the latter in jail.

Being a great reader, however, Levine did not find his incarceration particularly unpleasant; and, hearing of the Court of Appeals decision in the McDuff case, he spent his time in devising new schemes to take the place of his now antiquated specialty. On his release he immediately became a famous "sick engineer" and for a long time enjoyed the greatest prosperity, until one of his friends victimized him at his own game by inducing him to bet ten thousand dollars on the outcome of a prize-fight that he was simple-minded enough to believe had already been fought and won.

This was an elaborate variation of the ordinary wire-tapping game, where the sucker or lamb is introduced to a person alleged to be an inside official of a large telegraph company, who is ready to sell advance information of the results of sporting events in return for a share in the profits. The victim is taken to a supposed "branch office" of the company and actually hears the results of the races coming in over the wires and being telephoned to the pool- rooms. Of course the whole place is merely a plant fitted up for his benefit. He is then taken to a supposed pool-room and gives up his money for the purpose of having it placed as a wager on a horse-race already won. Under the McDuff case, it had been held by the courts that he had parted with his money for an illegal and dishonest purpose--to wit, in an attempt to win money from another who was wagering his own money in good faith--and the rogue who had seduced his conscience and slit his purse went free. This was Levine's favorite field of operations.

But his friend went him one better. Knowing that Levine had salted away a lot of money, he organized a gang of "cappers" and boosters, who made a great talk about the relative merits of two well-known pugilists. It was given out that a fight was to be "pulled off"

up the Hudson and a party was made up to attend it. A private car was taken by the friend in question and Levine was the guest of honor. Champagne flowed freely. The fight came off in a deserted barn near a siding above Poughkeepsie; and Levine wagered all of his money, with other prosperous-looking guests in the car, under the a.s.sumption that a bargain had been made between the "pugs" that his man should win. But the supposed sports were all "boosters"

in his friend's pay and the other man won after a spirited exhibition, which, although exciting, hardly consoled Levine for the loss of his money.

It is a curious fact that those of my clients who made great sums from time to time in ways similar to these rarely had any money; most of them died in abject poverty. Sooner or later all ran foul of the law and had to give up to the lawyers all they had managed to lay by.

When at last John Holliday, a dealer in automatic musical instruments, was "trimmed" out of sixty-five thousand dollars by various schemes of this character, the tardy Legislature finally amended the penal code in such a way as to do away with the farcical doctrine of the McDuff case and drove all our erstwhile clients out of business.

CHAPTER VIII

"Shake hands with Mr. Dillingham, Quib," said Gottlieb as I one day unexpectedly entered the latter's office. "We have a matter on hand in which he is interested."

"Glad to know you, Mr. Quibble," quoth the client, extending a rather soft hand. "Your name is well known to me, although I have never personally had the pleasure of your acquaintance."

"The future will, I trust, remedy that," I replied, not particularly impressed with the stranger's features or expression, but conscious somehow of the smell of money about him. For he was short and fat and wore a brown surtout and a black stovepipe hat, and his little gray eyes peeped out of full, round, red cheeks. On his lower lip we wore a tiny goatee.

"As I was saying," he continued, turning again to my partner, "we all of us make mistakes and I made the biggest one when I annexed the present Mrs. D. I was a young fool hardly out of my teens, and the sight of a pretty face and a tearful story of woe were too much for me. She was an actress. _Comprenez?_ A sort of Lydia Languish, la-de-da kind of a girl. Oh, she caught me fast enough, and it was only after I had swallowed the hook, sinker and all, that I found out she was married."

"Ho-ho!" remarked Gottlieb. "The old story."

"The same little old story," a.s.sented Dillingham. "Take a cigar?"

He produced a well-filled case.

I dropped into a chair and hitched it toward them.

"Now, the fact of the matter is," continued he, "she wouldn't look at me as long as she was tied to her husband, miserable rat though he was; and he was and is a rat! I could call and take her out to dinner, and all that, but--pst! nothing more! and she was always telling me how I was her good angel and inspired her to higher things! Gad! even then it bored me! But I could see nothing but her face. You know how it is. I was twenty-six and a clerk in a hardware house."

He laughed grimly.

"Well, as luck would have it, my Uncle John died just about that time and left me ten thousand dollars and I started in to make her my own by getting her a divorce. Now, this husband of hers was a wretched fellow--the son of a neighbor--who never got beyond being a waiter in a railroad station. Say, it is rather rough, eh? To think of me, Dillingham, of Dillingham, Hodges & Flynn, the biggest independent steel man in the State, tied up to a pale-faced woman who can't speak the King's English properly and whose first husband is a waiter--yes, a waiter to-day, understand, in a railroad restaurant at Baltimore! It makes me sick every time I go to Was.h.i.+ngton. I can't eat--fact! So I hired a lawyer for her--you know him, I guess--Bunce. Oscar Willoughby Bunce! And he prepared divorce papers--Oh, we had cause enough! And the next time Hawkins --that was the husband's name, Arthur P. Hawkins--came over to New York, to borrow some money from his wife, Bunce slapped a summons on him. It makes me squirm to think how delighted I was to know we had actually begun our case. Hawkins hired a lawyer, I believe, and pretended he was going to put up a defence, but I bought him off and we got our decree by default. Then, gentlemen"--Dillingham paused with a wry face--"I had the inestimable privilege of marrying my present wife!"

He sucked meditatively on his cigar for a few moments before resuming his narrative.

"Curious, isn't it--the fascination of the stage? You, gentlemen, probably have observed it even more than I have; but when he sees a slim girl with yellow curls capering around in tights behind the footlights, a young man's imagination runs riot and he fancies her the incarnation of coquetry and the personification of vivacious loveliness. I admit it--the present Mrs. Dillingham was a dancer.

On the stage she used to ogle me out of my shoes and off it she'd help me spend my money and drink my wine and jolly me up to beat the cars; but once I'd married her she changed completely. Instead of a das.h.i.+ng, snappy, tantalizing sort of a little Yum-Yum, she turned religious and settled down so you wouldn't have known her.